I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state.

Plus, it's not really a "good" atlatl. It's a tad too heavy. It was something I threw together quickly with the crap I had laying around just to have something a while back.

If NYS would see fit to approving the use of atlatls for hunting, I would make a better one, and I'd practice the living fark out with it like I do with my bow, and I'd get good enough. Might even use a knapped head on a hardwood foreshaft for the dart.

Back when I was a newly minted ham radio operator, the club I was affiliated with was going to do the Jamboree On The Air for the local Boy Scout district. I was also involved in scouting at the time, even though I was just out of the Army. I was put in charge of putting up the antenna, a big wire doublet fed with 450 ohm "window" line. I think that I was nominated for this task mainly because I was like 23 years old at the time, and they figured I was young enough and fit enough to be shimmying up trees to put the antenna up.

I hate heights.

So I went to the local hardware store and bought a couple of thick dowels. For one, I cut the dowel to about 18 inches long, and I cut one end of it off about halfway through at the end, creating a sort of half-round wedge. I flipped that around, and used electrical tape to attach it to the dowel, so it made a "hook". I then took the other dowel, and cut a notch in the back that corresponded to that "hook". I wrapped some thick solder on the other end, and wrapped that in electrical tape to keep it in place, so it was nose-heavy.

I tied string to the back of that thick, heavy, and fin-less dart, and that's how I got the antenna ropes up (dart goes over branch string, untie dart, tie rope to string, haul rope up with antenna attached and tie it off at the bottom, Repeat for other side of doublet). Needless to say, I got the antenna up higher than I would have either by merely throwing a weight with a string attached, or by climbing the trees.

One of the hams, the librarian at the local community college, goes "Hey, that's an atlatl!". Turns out he knew the only guy actually licensed in NYS to hunt with one (mainly for archeological research purposes). My Elmer (ham radio mentor), an elderly retired engineer who had known my family for years through his association with scouting came up to me and asked "How did you know how to do that?" I answered "I'm a [surname] boy. We know these things", which brought a guffaw from him.